Fissure
by xotakux2002x
Summary: A differing of opinions on one simple matter leads to problems between Itachi and Kisame. kisaita
1. Chapter 1

_Fissure: n. a narrow opening or crack of considerable length and depth, usually occurring from some breaking or parting; a separation or disagreement in thought or viewpoint._

In Kisame's humble but educated opinion, the ultimate form of weakness a ninja could show was blind loyalty to a team member over the success of his mission. There was absolutely no place for emotions in the world of a professional ninja; any jonin ranked man or woman knew that. He himself had abandoned partners before, even killed members of his own team for the sake of a successful mission without a moment's hesitation, because that was his duty as a ninja. To him, the world was rather black and white on this particular issue. If the success of one's assignment could be jeopardized by a weak partner, either one physically injured or likely to divulge sensitive information if captured, then said partner should be removed from the equation one way or another.

However, despite his best efforts to explain this concept to Itachi, the Uchiha adamantly refused to accept his viewpoint on the matter. Normally this was a differing of minds that Kisame would let slide, but this argument was more than a bit of a problem at the moment, since Kisame was bleeding quite badly thanks to a large burn on his side, and there was a good chance that they were being pursued by the enemy who had given him the burn in the first place and likely wanted to do a lot more harm to them.

"Leave me behind, damn it," Kisame growled. "You need to get back to the base with the scroll for Pein. I'm dead weight."

"Hn."

The shark suddenly hissed as another layer of skin cracked from the burns and another small stream of blood trickled out, running down to soak through his already ruined shirt. Currently he was using his cloak to stem the bleeding, but the rough fabric was causing its fair share of problems by rubbing the injured area raw. He needed to sit down somewhere and properly bandage it, but there was no time in the midst of their escape. "Shit, it's not stopping."

"Just a little further," Itachi reassured him, eyes focused ahead on the road for any signs of the enemy. In the event of a sneak attack, he'd be the one who needed to fight them off.

" _I'll_ stop, _you_ go on and get back to the base. There's no point in both of us being killed."

Once again, Itachi ignored the shark's command and kept walking alongside his partner. They were only able to go a little further before Kisame suddenly swayed and stopped walking to brace himself against a tree. The bleeding was getting worse, and he wouldn't be able to continue for much longer without proper medical care. "Damn it."

Itachi gave his partner a concerned look, and then stepped off the path and into the forest. Kisame took a breath and followed after the weasel a moment later, wondering why in Kami's name Itachi couldn't just be a reasonable person and leave Kisame to die in peace.

Itachi was able to locate a small clearing further into the woods, sheltered enough to hide them from most prying eyes but open enough to provide a decent campground. Kisame peeled off his charred cloak and shirt while Itachi extracted their first aid kit and a canteen from what remained of their supplies. They barely had enough water left to properly clean Kisame's wound, a fact that the shark was quick to point out. "Stop wasting our water! There's no river or stream around here, so you're screwed for at least another day, maybe more," Kisame protested in vain as the canteen was dumped out over the burn.

"We can go a day without water," Itachi countered as he began rubbing burn salve over the injury and then packing gauze into the wound.

Kisame let out an exasperated sigh and snatched the bandages from Itachi's hand. "I can dress my own wounds," he snapped as he began winding the fabric around his body. At least, he attempted to do so, but the constant movement he made to wrap the bandages around himself caused them to slip loose when the muscles flexed and then relaxed. He tried for several minutes more before Itachi mercifully took the bandages out of his hand and began wrapping the wound himself. "Say anything and I will kill you."

"Hn."

"It's not like this is the first time I've had to take of myself, Itachi. This used to happen back in Kiri sometimes, and I managed there just fine. Know why? Because I had to, since my teammates had the common sense to leave me behind-"

"Kisame, shut up." The Uchiha's irises had turned red now; apparently his patience had finally run out.

The shark sat quietly while Itachi finished dressing his wound, still unsure of what the Uchiha was thinking. He was putting their entire mission in jeopardy, and for what? Some misplaced sense of comradery that had no business in their line of work? It just didn't make sense to Kisame.

Itachi snipped the bandages and pronounced the work done, snapping Kisame out of his musings. Moments later the Uchiha wandered off into the woods, presumably to get dinner or firewood since he'd left his gear on the ground near Kisame. "I don't get it," Kisame muttered. "I really, really don't get it."

The weasel returned roughly an hour later with a stack of firewood and a rabbit he'd been able to snare. In only a few minutes he had a small fire going, and Kisame could only presume that they were safe from their pursuers for the time being; there was no way Itachi would dare light a fire if there was a chance that they might be followed. The weasel cooked their dinner himself and the pair ate in silence afterwards. While Itachi extinguished the flames from their fire, Kisame took the remains of his cloak and balled it up into a pillow, intending on getting as much sleep as possible before they had to move out. Hopefully in the morning the world would make sense again.

-n-

"Kisame?"

The shark awoke to the sound of his name, as well as a hand gently shaking him by the shoulder. Normally Kisame was one to rise before Itachi had even begun to stir, so for him to sleep in to early morning was already unusual. On top of this, his normally sharp mind felt fuzzy, and it took far more effort than it should have simply to sit up and acknowledge his partner's greeting. "Hey Itachi."

The weasel gave his partner a confused look as a still groggy Kisame began to undo the bandages around his waist to change them. This confusion morphed into worry as Kisame swore when he checked his wound. The flesh was red around the edge of the injury, and a quick check by his fingers confirmed that the skin was feverishly hot. They'd waited too long to dress the injury, and now Kisame was going to deal with a nasty infection.

The shark let out a few more choice curses and slumped back against a tree. "Now will you leave me? It'll take a week, maybe more, to get back to the base with me like this. Pein will start freaking out and think we've abandoned him, and there's no way _that's_ going to end well for either of us."

Itachi shook his head and extracted more bandages from the first aid kit. They were almost out, so they'd need to find both water and medical supplies in the next few days. Not exactly the best situation to be in, given how far out in the wilderness they were now situated. Itachi decided to pack the dirty bandages just in case; hopefully they'd find water and could at least wash the cloth before reusing it, if need be. Seeing that his partner was not about to do the sensible thing and leave him behind, Kisame reluctantly got to his feet and pulled on his ruined shirt and cloak. They scattered the ashes from the campfire and covered the fire scar in dirt, hoping to mask their campsite in the event that their pursuers came this way. Finally, they were off.

-n-

As Kisame had predicted, progress with his infection was painfully slow. It took another day and a half before they were able to find a stream, which certainly didn't do either of the ninjas any good. Kisame's wound wasn't getting any worse at least, but he'd still need proper medicine soon before the flesh could start to rot. They spent two more days on the road before Itachi was able to find an old fisherman's hut to take shelter in. It wasn't spacious and had long since been cleaned out of any usable supplies, but at least it was a proper shelter not far from a source of fresh water. All the same, Kisame couldn't help but worry. "Ok, maybe we're not being followed anymore," the shark acknowledged as Itachi redid his bandages yet again, now forced to use strips of fabric made from Kisame's ruined shirt (the old bandages were simply beyond another reuse), "but I'm still slowing you down! You can't deny that you'd be back at the base right now if I were in better shape."

"Hn."

"I'm not going to die from this, at least not yet. Just go ahead and get back to the base; I'll catch up with you soon, if my injury doesn't get worse."

"Hn."

"Would you stop with the 'hns' already?!" Kisame snapped. "You're not stupid, Itachi, you know that basic protocol says that if it's between a comrade and the success of a mission, the mission always takes priority! You're a ninja, act like it!"

Itachi finished wrapping the bandages and sat back, looking up at his partner.

"Can't you understand why this is a problem?! What you're doing right now makes no sense," Kisame ground out. "Konoha may have been softer on ninjas than Kiri, but I know you were trained to put your assignment before your teammates. Hell, you've killed people to protect your village, and not just enemies."

Itachi flinched but still said nothing.

"So why the hell is it different this time? We're not family, the Akatsuki is way less forgiving than a village council would be, and no one would say you were in the wrong leaving me behind, so stop acting like an amateur emotional idiot-"

Kisame's chiding was interrupted by a loud crack as Itachi slapped him across the face.

The shark blinked several times, trying to comprehend what had just happened. He and Itachi had gotten into disputes before, but it had never gotten physical. "Itachi-"

"Don't question me," Itachi commanded in a frighteningly soft whisper. "We are not at risk, nor is our mission. If you tell me to leave you one more time, all that will be left by me is your charred corpse after I incinerate you with Amaterasu. Understand?"

The fury in Itachi's eyes left no room for argument; Kisame had no doubts about his partner's willingness to carry out those threats. He nodded silently and Itachi rose, murmuring something about going out to catch them some dinner. They didn't look at each other as Itachi left; instead, Kisame quietly leaned back against the wall of the hut and stared blankly up at the ceiling. "What the hell's wrong with that kid," he wondered softly to himself. No answer came.

-n-

Days later, they were able to find a small farmer's hut that was still inhabited. Kisame waited in the woods while Itachi snuck inside and ransacked the place for any medicine they could use. The results weren't great; more bandages and some pills to keep Kisame's fever down (which had only gone up in the past few days), so they still needed to find an actual hospital or clinic to get antibiotics and possibly an x-ray on Kisame's ribs, which were quite sore now.

The pills did little to help; Kisame's fever kept rising, and the normally quiet shark had fallen in to talking constantly to keep from passing out. What's more, some of the comments he made now were silly bordering on absurd. Their only saving grace was that their pursuers had either given up chasing them or completely lost the trail, allowing the pair of them to travel at a steady but slightly slower pace. Unfortunately, this gave Kisame ample opportunity to ramble. "Geez, don't even know what to think about you now, Itachi," he grumbled one afternoon, draped heavily over his partner's shoulder to help keep him upright. "One minute you're this hardass who's nothing but business and completing our missions, next minute you're going all no man gets left behind on me. What are you, a knight in cloudy armor? The most murderous guardian angel in the history of ever?"

Itachi chose not to reply, instead focusing entirely on keeping Kisame upright and moving, which was proving to be quite the physical strain. He was strong, but Kisame had a good head in height and several dozen kilos in muscle on him. Besides, Kisame had been carrying on the conversation on his own for a good hour now, so any contributions the weasel might make would be entirely superfluous.

"You're something else, Uchiha, you know that? Really something else."

"Hn."

"And hey, I've been thinking. So you won't leave me; whatever. How about we both take a break then, huh? Find an inn, get some booze, pass out for a few days."

"Hn."

"Fine, be that way." A pause, and then: "Geez, you're small, you know that?"

"You're huge."

"Nah, you're just tiny. Tch, bet I could pick you up with one arm if I really wanted to."

Itachi glared at him, daring him to try.

"Fine, fine. Still bet I could though…" and then the conversation turned to topics of food that Kisame wanted to eat when they got to his imaginary inn, allowing Itachi a break to once again focusing on carrying his partner and wonder if the clinic they were hoping to find would be able to do something about his utterly sore back.

-n-

It took another two days of walking, but they were finally able to come to a small village that had a clinic with actual new medical equipment and wasn't run out of some old doctor's back porch. The nurses were smart enough not to press Itachi and Kisame when the ninjas fed the women a set of obviously fake names and a fake story about where Kisame's injuries had come from, and must have warned the doctor to do the same, because he didn't press it either. He did scold the pair of them for waiting so long to get Kisame's wound looked at, and had to clean out a bit of dead skin and tissue after putting Kisame on a round of the strongest antibiotics he had available at the clinic. He also advised them to spend the night at the clinic, or at least get a room in a hotel (this comment was made while giving a pointed glare to the dirt and twigs clinging to the bottom of Itachi's cloak) where they could properly wash up and get a good night's rest. While the two ninjas could have survived another night in the wild, a decent room did sound good, especially to Itachi and his aching muscles.

They ended up renting a small room above an old woman's house for cheap, and as soon as Itachi had dropped Kisame on his bed he'd left to get a new shirt for his partner. By the time he got back, Kisame was already completely passed out, and once he crawled into bed neither of them woke up until nearly lunchtime the next day. The shark claimed to be feeling better, but the meds wouldn't really take effect for another few days. Still, they couldn't afford to stay in this place for much longer (not unless they wanted to risk Pein sending other Akatsuki members after them), and after a quick lunch the duo were back on the road.

Kisame kept his promise not to argue with Itachi about leaving him behind, particularly since it became a moot point once his infection began to clear up. It would still be weeks before the burn was properly healed and his flesh completely knitted, but the treatment and medicine from the doctor would at least prevent him from scarring too badly. Eventually they were able to resume something bordering on their normal traveling pace, and returned to the Akatsuki base in a week.

Still, they'd arrived back at headquarters much later than Pein had expected, and were naturally subjected to a fierce interrogation by their severely displeased leader. Kisame had to walk a fine line of making his injury sound severe enough to delay them, but not so bad that Itachi would get into trouble for not leaving him to complete the mission (like all ninja protocol said to do, the shark bitterly added in his own mind). Eventually they were given a severe scolding and put on cleanup duty for the next two weeks, but Pein allowed them to leave his office in one piece.

Walking down the hallway towards their room, Kisame knew that he should just let the matter drop. He knew it with every fiber of his being. The mission was over, he was on the road to a full recovery, and there was no way it would ever come up in conversation again. And yet, there was still something he had to say. "Itachi?"

"Hn?"

"Just so you know, if the situation was reversed, I would have left you behind without a second thought."

"I know what you would have done," Itachi quietly replied as he walked past their doorway to the kitchen.

Kisame watched him go for a minute, and then shook his head as he entered their bedroom. He needed medicine and sleep, preferably in large quantities for both. "Seriously, I just don't understand that kid…"


	2. Chapter 2

Over the course of the next two months, Kisame couldn't help but dwell on his partner's refusal to leave him behind on their disastrous retrieval mission. He knew that it was pointless to think about it; nobody in the entire Akatsuki had the mental faculties to comprehend the inner workings of Itachi's mind, so even if Kisame devoted every waking moment of his day to thinking about his partner's motivation or logic, he'd only end up exactly where he'd started. He didn't dare try to bring up the topic with Itachi after their last fight, and the Uchiha himself seemed to be acting completely normal once again. So no matter how one looked at it, it was completely pointless for Kisame to get so hung up on this single faux pas of ninja protocol. Every fiber of his being was telling him to just let it go and be grateful that he was still alive and moving; but he couldn't. He just couldn't.

After accepting that he'd never get a straight answer, Kisame had decided to quietly observe Itachi over the next few assignments to see if he could gain any new insight into the psyche of his partner. Maybe Itachi had a secret soft side that liked caring for wounded animals, and it happened to carry over to taking care of injured partners. Maybe the weasel felt like he owed Kisame for some past favor the shark had done, or else was planning on earning a favor by saving Kisame then (not happening, if that was the case). There had to be some explanation; Kisame just needed to find it.

But no answers were forthcoming, and analyzing his partner revealed no new information; if anything, it just succeeded in making Kisame's life more difficult when Itachi grew annoyed at the shark following him everywhere. And then, several months after that fateful day, on an entirely different mission, things officially went to shit.

A possible lead on the location of a tailed beast had turned out to be a false tip with a fair number of deadly ninjas lying in wait for them in a field; further complicating the matter, on top of the usual grunts in the party, several of the enemies were genjutsu masters. Kisame, to his credit, was overall fairly adept at handling genjutsu users on normal assignments, usually by removing their head from the rest of their body after breaking through their genjutsus. These ninjas, however, were quite good at layering illusion upon illusion, and Kisame no sooner broke through one hallucination than another appeared before his eyes. "Oh give me a fucking break," he growled after bursting through an illusion of an ocean only to find himself in the middle of a never-ending hallway. He wouldn't be able to keep this up forever; besides, there was no telling how long his physical body back in the real world would last as he tried to break his mind free from their control.

All of a sudden the hallway disappeared and Kisame found himself back in the middle of the field he and Itachi had encountered the enemies in. He was now surrounded by a number of ninjas that were either incapacitated or on fire; Itachi must have taken care of them while his partner was trapped in the illusionary world. Speaking of whom…

Kisame looked around until he finally located a clearly exhausted Itachi kneeling on the ground and panting to catch his breath. That in and of itself wasn't a good sign; for Itachi to be winded like this was highly irregular. He was bleeding from a large gash on his leg as well, which was quickly soaking through the fabric of his pants; even more worrisome. "What the hell happened to you?" Kisame asked, studying his injured partner with more curiosity than worry.

Itachi glared up at the shark as he shakily rose to his feet. "We were attacked," he explained.

"That's not…oh forget it," Kisame grumbled with a dismissive wave of his hand. It didn't really matter what specifically had happened to his partner, and surprise surprise, Itachi didn't feel like telling him what had transpired while the shark was incapacitated. "Look, we need to get out of here. We're pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but when these guys don't show up again at their base we're going to have some of their friends chasing us down. I'd say we have maybe a day's head start before company joins us."

"Hn," Itachi agreed. "We need to go."

The two ninjas set off as quickly as their injuries would allow; Kisame only had a few scratches compared to Itachi's gaping leg wound, but breaking through all those illusions had taken a rather heavy toll on his chakra supply, massive though it was. Progress was slow, though Kisame was convinced it would have been a bit less so if Itachi wasn't so badly injured. Eventually they had to stop on the side of the road so Itachi could give his wound a proper bandage job when the hurried field wrap began to come undone. "Hurry up," Kisame ordered. "Or I'm leaving." Itachi said nothing, choosing instead to focus on wrapping his leg. Once he was convinced that the bandage would hold, the two were off again hobbling as quickly as they could, out of the field and into a forest that would at least provide them with a bit of cover.

They spent nearly half a day like this, with Kisame growing progressively more and more annoyed at his partner. The kid's injury was going to cost them any head start they might have otherwise gained, and if the first line of attack had such powerful genjutsu users, Kisame really didn't want to see what kind of power and abilities the reinforcements were packing. Finally, when Itachi insisted that they pull over and take shelter in an old hunter's lodge, Kisame had had enough. "We're going to get killed if we keep going this slowly!" he snapped.

Itachi shook his head as he rewrapped his bandages once again. "I need some time to rest."

"Well fine, take all the time you need. _I'm_ heading back to the base," Kisame declared as he stormed across the single room of the hut towards the exit. He opened the door, paused, curtly said, "I'll try and lead them off your trail," and then slammed the door shut behind him.

Free of the burden of an injured ally, Kisame was able to travel at a much faster pace and quickly put a safe distance between himself and the battlefield. Yet even as he traveled, the feeling of annoyance brought on by Itachi's injuries didn't subside. If anything, his frustration grew with each step he took; soon, his stupid brain was thinking about his own injuries from that fight not so long ago, and how Itachi had stuck with him then. "That was a stupid move then, and it's a stupid move now," Kisame told himself. "He's just lucky we weren't caught."

Kisame kept sprinting through the woods.

"Really stupid. It went against every aspect of training we've received since day one."

The sprinting slowed to an easy run.

"No one else would've done that, because they know better! Tch, and people call him a genius."

The run slowed to a fast walk.

"I never would have done that. Not as a rookie, not as a squad leader, not with any of my old partners. Seriously, what the hell was he thinking…"

The walk slowed and then stopped.

"God fucking damnit!" Kisame swore as he spun around and charged back the way he came, cursing Itachi all the while. "Why did that stupid brat have to go crazy on me?!"

Kisame's head start was completely destroyed as he backtracked towards the hunter's cabin; the odds were very much against him and Itachi being able to escape their pursuers now. Needless to say, Kisame was not very happy to discover the several layers of genjutsu that Itachi had tacked onto his hideout, and probably ripped through them with more force than was strictly necessary. He entered the cabin to find a very dazed Itachi slumped over on the floor taking shaky breaths; yeah, definitely more force than was necessary. "Stupid crazy pain in the ass kid," he snarled as he kneeled down and scooped up Itachi in his arms before the Uchiha knew what was happening. "I ought to just snap your neck now," he went on as he stormed out of the cabin and took off into the forest once more.

"Thought you said…you could carry me with one arm," Itachi whispered.

"You're lucky I'm not dragging you along by your hair," Kisame growled. "And between you and Samehada, I'm packing an easy 200 pounds here, so stuff it!" Itachi listened to his partner and didn't reply, allowing himself to be carried in silence.

Unfortunately for both of them, Kisame's predictions were right; the next day their enemies were able to catch up. Twice he had to stop and hide Itachi in the thick bushes growing near the base of a great tree, telling the Uchiha to stay put until he got back, and twice he had to return and retrieve his still feeble partner after the other ninjas had either been led off their trail or worse. Their only saving grace was that these reinforcements relied quite heavily on brute force; and in a contest of pure strength, there was no beating the Hoshigaki. That didn't mean fighting off the attackers was easy, oh no, not by any stretch of the imagination; it merely meant that such a task was not completely impossible.

"Should've just left you back there," the shark growled after he picked up Itachi for the second time. "Should've just gone back to the base myself, damnit." Itachi tried not to take the grumbling personally, seeing as Kisame was looking pretty beat up by now, and he of course had the good sense not to mention the swordsman's weakened state aloud. They were traveling along a river now; in his frustration, the shark might legitimately try to drown him. Instead, he shut his eyes and leaned his head against Kisame's chest, trying to doze if he couldn't completely fall asleep.

After a few more days, the two Akatsuki members had either managed to completely elude their pursuers or said pursuers had given up on hunting them down. Itachi had mostly recovered by this point, by his leg wound prevented him from moving at any pace faster than a slight jog. Several times Kisame grew frustrated enough by this to loop the Uchiha's arm over his shoulder to half-carry the weasel along with him, cursing all the while. "Seriously, this is never going to happen again," he promised Itachi in a grumble.

"Hn," Itachi murmured softly.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

Itachi tilted his head up to look Kisame in the eye. "Thank you for this once, then."

The shark made a noise of disgust and turned his head away. "Whatever."

Unlike Kisame's burn, their wounds from this debacle didn't require immediate attention. They hurried along and passed through several villages with sufficient means to patch them up, choosing instead to wait until they were in the village near the mountainside base to receive proper medical treatment. The doctors here knew better than to ask any questions more intrusive than, "How old is this?" or "Are you absolutely certain you weren't poisoned?" A couple stitches for Itachi, a little salve for Kisame's scrapes, and the two of them were on their way before the afternoon was out.

The report to Pein was mostly factual, and concerned itself almost entirely with the betrayal to the Akatsuki and recommended acts of retribution against the local priest that had fed them the misinformation in the first place. At no point was Itachi's weakened state brought up, nor Kisame's efforts to get the weasel back to the base. As far as Pein knew, they'd both successfully escaped with only minor injuries and had taken out quite a few enemy ninjas in the process. They were both commended for a job well done and then dismissed to await further orders.

Neither Kisame nor Itachi spoke on the way out of the office, nor did they talk in the hallway on the way to their room. It wasn't until they were both in the bedroom with the door locked behind them that Kisame said anything. "Don't expect me to ever do that again," he stated firmly. "That was a one-time error in judgment, got it?"

"So you've said," was all Itachi replied as he reached his bed and stretched out, clearly exhausted from the past several days.

Kisame rolled his eyes at the weasel's answer. "I told you I'd leave you behind, and I meant it. You told me you understood that-"

"I didn't say I knew you'd leave me," Itachi whispered softly. "I said I knew what you'd do."

Kisame crossed his arms and frowned at his partner. "You're not serious, are you?"

"…"

"How the hell did you supposedly 'know' that I'd stick around to help you if you got injured, huh?! Especially when I told you the complete opposite!"

Itachi gave his partner a look that was somewhere between patience and pity. "I just did."

"How?!"

The Uchiha shook his head and pulled his comforter up over his head. "Figure it out yourself."

Kisame clenched and unclenched his fists, swore, and then stormed out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him. He needed to step outside the base for a bit, and preferably destroy some targets with his sword while he was out. "What the hell is with that kid?!"


	3. Chapter 3

Weeks passed, and Kisame was no closer to figuring out Itachi's cryptic message than he was on the night that the weasel had said those fateful words to him. He could still see the look on Itachi's face, hear the quiet way that the weasel had told him, "I knew what you'd do." How?! How could Itachi possibly have predicted Kisame throwing over twenty years of ninja training out the window for his criminal partner, of all people?! It was driving him up the wall, and efforts to ignore Itachi's words or forget their deeper meaning had utterly failed.

To his credit, Kisame had initially tried to ignore his partner's assertion and move on with his life, recalling how little luck he'd had getting an answer the last time his partner had done something to annoy him like this. He'd thrown himself headlong into training around the clock, since the in the past training with Samehada had been a great release for him; but although his body was constantly moving, the exercise was unable to distract his mind from his frustrated musings. It just didn't make sense to the natural order of things as Kisame understood them. There was no way Itachi could have predicted how Kisame would react to seeing him injured (unless the Uchiha's Sharingan abilities actually made him psychic, which Kisame had considered as a possibility on more than one occasion). Kisame had made it perfectly clear during their first meeting that he would only tolerate Itachi as his partner for as long as the weasel was able to make himself useful. There was no room for compassion or loyalty to a weakened partner in their line of work; you didn't get to be Kisame's age without realizing that. Honestly, Itachi should have assumed that Kisame would sooner kill him than help out once Itachi became injured.

But he hadn't. Itachi had confidently asserted that he'd somehow known that Kisame would come to his aid, when even the swordsman himself hadn't been able to fathom such an action. And although there was a chance that Itachi was lying and just trying to come off as a know-it-all to his partner (and oh, how Kisame had desperately clung to that idea for a while), the shark felt deep down in his gut that Itachi was telling the truth. But if that was the case, then how? How could Itachi have predicted Kisame rescuing him?

More infuriating than not understanding Itachi's line of thinking was the fact that Itachi refused to explain himself. He kept telling Kisame that his partner needed to figure this out without Itachi's help, and had recently resorted to threatening Kisame in order to get him to stop pestering his partner about this (when he didn't simply slip away under the guise of a genjutsu of course). Why was the weasel being so difficult?! If Kisame hadn't figured it out after three weeks of pondering, the answer wasn't about to appear before him at any point in the near future. But despite requests, pleas, and even a few threats on Kisame's part, Itachi absolutely would not budge on this.

Training didn't help. Thinking didn't help. Asking Itachi for a goddamn straight answer especially didn't help. Kisame, therefore, was left in a very frustrated and slightly murderous mood for days on end.

Eventually he was saved by the mercy of Pein, who called him into his office one afternoon while Itachi was outside "training" (though in truth was likely hiding from Kisame and his increasingly annoying barrage of questions). The leader probably picked up on Kisame's anxiety as soon as the shark walked into his office, but chose not to say anything to Kisame about it. "Kisame," he began, "you and Itachi have both had plenty of time to recuperate from your last assignment, wouldn't you agree?"

"Yeah, why? You have something new planned for us?"

"As a matter of fact, yes," Pein stated as he pushed a manila folder towards the swordsman. "One of our allies has recently had an issue with a rival merchant group. I need you to take out their main supply line. While you're doing that, Itachi will be 'negotiating' with the local nobles around that area to turn a blind eye when the merchant guild calls for aid. After that, I'll need you two to join back up at this location (here he pointed to the edge of a mountainous region on Kisame's map) and take out the main caravan, which by that point will be much more heavily fortified. The loss of supplies and manpower will no doubt cripple the group for a while, and keep our friend very happy."

Kisame nodded, flipping through the mission details. It wasn't the most glamourous assignment he'd ever been sent on, nor was it the most challenging, but at least it would be more interesting than traveling around and trying to collect information on the tailed beasts that the Akatsuki still hadn't managed to locate. He finally closed the file and looked up. "When do you want us to leave?"

"First thing tomorrow morning. The supply route is going to have heavy traffic about two weeks from now, and you'll have nearly a hundred miles to hike to get there aside from needing time there to prepare an attack. Itachi will leave with you, but you'll separate a bit south of your final destination. And let me just add, this mission is incredibly important if we are to retain the power we have in this particular region. Don't disappoint me."

Kisame nodded and took the file with him as he left the office. He got back to his room, intending to give the file straight to Itachi, and then cursed when he realized that the Uchiha was still outside the base for training. "Goddamn kid changing up his routine on me," Kisame growled as he stormed out of the base in search of his partner.

Fortunately for the shark's rapidly dwindling patience, Itachi wasn't hard to locate. The raven-haired ninja had taken a food break from whatever training he'd been doing and was sitting under an oak tree on the edge of a clearing that Kisame himself liked to use for sword practice on a regular basis. Itachi glanced up from his sandwich and set it down on the napkin in his lap when Kisame approached, no doubt noticing the manila folder in the swordsman's hand that could only signify a mission from Pein. "Kisame?"

"That lunch is pathetic," Kisame scoffed as he approached the weasel. "There's a reason you're all skin and bones, you know that, right? It's because you never eat anything, and I end up having to do all the heavy lifting for us."

"What's the mission?"

"Crushing a supply line," Kisame explained as he dropped the file onto Itachi's lap, nearly letting it land on the Uchiha's lunch as he did so. "Nothing too out of the ordinary; I bash a few skulls, you threaten a few nobles, we knock out their best men and then go home."

"Hn," Itachi grunted in acknowledgement, having opened the file while Kisame was speaking and now was flipping through it.

"We leave at dawn, split up halfway to the final location, do our work, and then join back up for the final push."

Itachi nodded as he continued reading through the mission details, no doubt wanting to investigate the elements of their assignment that Kisame had surely neglected to mention. "Sounds simple enough," he finally agreed. "We can handle this."

Something about the casual way that Itachi was treating him set off something in Kisame, and before he could stop himself, he was tearing into his partner. "You sure? Because I'm pretty certain that I can handle this, but apparently I don't know anything about myself or what I'll actually do in a given scenario. Oh, but lucky me, you do! Itachi Uchiha, murderer, S-rank ninja, and Kisame Hoshigaki's person psychic. How lucky can one ninja get?! So tell me, all-knowing seer of the future, are you absolutely certain that I'm going to go through with this mission and not fuck off halfway through our assignment? Or how about taking a detour to a lovely vacation spot, hm? Hell, maybe I'll even find nirvana!"

Itachi sighed in a manner that was slightly more exhausted than annoyed and shut the folder on his lap. "Kisame, is this really necessary?"

"Why the hell can't you just tell me how you supposedly knew that I'd cart your sorry ass back to base?! It's driving me insane, Itachi. Hell, if this goes on for much longer-"

"Is it going to interfere with your ability to complete our missions?" Itachi cut in before Kisame could really go off on a tirade.

"No idea. But since you apparently have such an amazing understanding of what will cause me to break from basic ninja protocol-"

At this point, Itachi had had enough and shot to his feet, getting close enough to Kisame that the shark could feel the heat being given off from Itachi's body. The Uchiha's eyes were blood red; one wrong word, and Kisame would find himself in a world of pain and misery before he could even consider striking the Uchiha. "Stop it. You're acting like a child that hasn't gotten his way."

Yet even in the face of impending doom, Kisame was never one to back down. "I'll stop as soon as you explain yourself. Just answer my question, and we can both move on with our lives."

There was a tense pause as each ninja stared into the other's eyes, unwilling to break from their staring contest before the other. Neither spoke; not even a muscle twitched between the pair. For a brief moment, Kisame wondered if maybe this argument between them would actually come to blows.

And then there was a soft sigh as Itachi's eyes returned to their normal black, before the weasel stepped away. "I'll explain if you haven't figured it out by the end of this mission," he stated quietly, turning his back to Kisame. "But don't become upset when you hear my answer."

"Fine, fine," Kisame agreed, feeling a small amount of relief wash over him at Itachi's promise. He'd be a lot happier if Itachi would just come out and tell him what the weasel was thinking, but at least now he had a hard and fast date for when he'd get an explanation. Presuming that he and Itachi survived until then, of course, but there wasn't any reason for Kisame to think that anything about this mission would be any different from what they normally dealt with.

Oh, how wrong he was.

-n-

The first few days of the mission went just as the two ninjas expected. They didn't speak much except while plotting out the finer details of their mission, usually while hitching a ride on the back of a cart when they needed a break from running. They quickly decided that Kisame would probably need two days to reach the target after they parted ways, and then another day to actually carry out the mission. Itachi's timing was a little harder to predict; nobles could be finicky creatures, even when the Akatsuki name was thrown around, and therefore they could drag out the mission for days, maybe even more than a week. As annoying and dangerous as it might be, Itachi and Kisame were forced to acknowledge the reality that they might have to regroup before Itachi could complete his part of the mission, and thus force the duo to contend with more enemies than they'd like to. For this reason they rushed through the first leg of their mission at top speed; Kisame's body could take the abuse, and Itachi would likely have at least a little time to rest while carrying out his assignment. Eventually the pair split up, and Kisame didn't hear from his partner for another week. It was just as well that Itachi took his time, because the shark's initial assumption of destroying his target in the span of a day proved to be a gross underestimate.

The major difficulty in this assignment was that Kisame was severely limited in the types of attacks he could use for the first hit on the supply route. The mission file made it very clear that their client wanted it to be obvious that the traveling merchants and their cargo had been attacked by a person, and not destroyed by any sort of natural disaster; thus, most of Kisame's large-scale water techniques were out. Instead, he's set up a few explosive tags along the route where the caravan would be passing. A fair number of the merchants would surely be killed in the initial blasts, and in the confusion Kisame would easily be able to pick off a few others. He didn't have to kill everyone; Pein's notes made it clear that it was the second part of the mission that needed to have an almost perfect kill rate, since that would be the supply run with the best armed (and most expensive) guards. In fact, letting a few men get away during the first stage might actually work to their benefit, since the survivors would no doubt scurry back to their boss like scared little rabbits and beg him to spend a bit more on tougher security next time. All in all, Kisame felt like he had the perfect plan given the restrictions on his assignment.

Kisame was able to take a very brief nap after setting the trap, and woke up about an hour before the targets were set to pass his hiding spot (a well-hidden depression behind a group of bushes on the cliff overlooking the caravan's path). It was getting late in the afternoon, and the sun was already starting to sink in the sky; worst case scenario, he'd be able to fall back to a safe distance and completely disappear under the cover of night.

He waited in silence, keeping an eye on the sun and hoping everything would go right. The caravan was right on time, and once the first wagon came into sight Kisame was able to see a row of a dozen armored wagons that were each guarded by two or three men, followed by a single armored truck. That immediately set off a few alarm bells in Kisame's head. Normal goods like food or fabric didn't need to be carried in armored vehicles like this, and they certainly didn't require an armed guard. It was also a bit worrisome that the majority of the men walking alongside the cargo appeared to be armed guards; in fact, upon closer inspections Kisame couldn't even find a person that looked like a normal merchant and wasn't carrying at least a knife of some kind. Besides all that, any motorized vehicle would have surely been incredibly expensive for even the richest of merchants, and adding all that armor definitely drove up the cost even more. Nothing about this looked like a normal merchant caravan. Kisame had the distinct feeling that either Pein's intel was outdated or incorrect, which was presuming that the Akatsuki leader hadn't just lied to him or left some details out of his mission assignment on purpose. Completely on edge now, Kisame nevertheless had to follow through with this part of the plan and quickly set off the explosives he'd planted earlier, wondering if perhaps he should have planted a few more given the presence of the armored truck.

The effects were immediate. Half of the wagons were quickly engulfed in the explosions, reduced to smithereens and ash (along with whatever unfortunate guards had been standing close by) while the rest were blown onto their sides or flipped completely over, rendered totally immobile by the force of the blasts. Thick plumes of black smoke billowed into the sky, and soon the sounds of terrified and angry screams filled the air. Only the truck was able to survive mostly unscathed; the driver had crashed into the side of the mountain after one of the wagons had flown backwards and slammed into its side, but from what Kisame could tell it was likely still functional. Not good enough. Kisame would have to get in closer and finish the job.

However, as soon as Kisame moved down from his position onto the road, ready to pick off the first dazed or horrified guard that came his way, he immediately realized why this cargo had been so well-guarded. A fine white powder was floating through the air, having been sent up in a cloud after several of the trucks exploded. Some of the powder was falling back down onto the flaming wreckage below, producing a sweet smell in the air that Kisame recognized from some rather seedy establishments he'd had to visit before. "Oh no."

Let it never be said that Kisame Hoshigaki was a man without at least a few scruples. The swordsman was fine with lying, stealing, even murdering an enemy in cold blood, but there were certain lines that he'd never cross under any circumstances. He'd turned down exactly two jobs in his career, and both with good reason. The first occurred when he refused to help a human trafficker move his "product" across Fire Country, because the risk was nowhere near the reward and Kisame personally found the man to be a prime example of the scum of the earth. The second refusal, and easily the worse of the two, was when he turned down a substantial offer from a cartel lord to move some rather valuable powder into a city and help distribute it to certain clubs in the area.

Drug deals, in Kisame's book, were always incredibly messy for a variety of reasons. In the first place, there was too much money at stake in any major drug deal for anyone to act sane, so reasoning your way out a tough situation as usually not an option. Second, the drugs were more often than not surrounded by junkies who were always looking for a fix (and would gladly attack you with a knife if they thought it would get that) alongside guards who were always heavily armed, which meant that when you inevitably had to fight your way out of a bad situation because of the afore-mentioned lack of reasoning, it was often a tough and frustrating battle. Above all, Kisame just found the whole process distasteful. At least most of the people he killed had put themselves in a position where they were willing to risk death; drug dealers were willing to suck the lives out of regular citizens for the sake of making easy money. Any ninja worth a damn, criminal or not, knew to give these cartels a wide berth, because any encounter you had with a drug cartel would invariably end poorly for you unless you had a small army willing to back you up.

Kisame did not have this luxury, and had definitely just blown up a cartel shipment that was probably worth more than the bounty for every Akatsuki member combined. This was not going to end well for him.

Kisame had initially been planning to pick off a few men at a time, falling back to the safety of the thick forest trees in the forest below the route between attacks. Now that he knew this was a drug cartel, however, his best chance of survival would be killing as many men as he could, as fast as he could. The guards were trained professionals, and if Kisame gave them a chance to regroup, he was a dead man. Swearing, the shark grabbed Samehada in his hand and rushed forward.

The first few targets went down without any resistance, mostly because they didn't realize the danger they were in until it was far too late to act. They were understandably shocked by the explosion, and were still trying to get their bearings and figure out exactly what the hell had happened when Kisame rushed up and separated their heads from their bodies with a single swing of his sword. That was the easiest part of Kisame's mission, and after that the difficulty shot up dramatically.

The other survivors, now realizing they were under attack, had regrouped and headed towards the armored truck. Now prepared for a fight, they were rapidly extracting weapons that had been packed into the back of the vehicle (likely in preparation for an attack like his, Kisame thought bitterly). The men were soon armed with swords, knives, explosives, and all manner of weapons that Kisame certainly didn't want to get too close to. What's more, given the look in their eyes and the jerky way that some of them were moving, Kisame was almost certain that most of these men were hyped up on something. That in and of itself was a huge problem, because depending on what they were on, they'd keep fighting through whatever pain or injuries Kisame could inflict that would drop an ordinary man to his knees; hell, some of them might not even notice the damage until they'd passed out from blood loss. Realizing for the first time that he might actually be at a huge disadvantage in this fight, Kisame fell back into the forest at top speed, intending to put enough distance between him and the guards to give himself time to come up with a better plan.

The next few days were like a horrible game of hide and seek for Kisame. Whatever the guards were on kept them from either wanting or needing sleep, and even in the dead of night the swordsman had to stay on the move. He had to move carefully, picking them off one at a time and then falling back into the shadows for a few hours until the tweakers would be comfortable or stupid enough to let their guard drop slightly. This method of attack wasn't without its drawbacks, though; one more than one occasion the guards were able to get a few hits in before Kisame could escape to safety, and as their numbers dwindled, it became harder and harder to get them to split up. Finally, realizing that he couldn't afford to waste any additional time on this part of the assignment, Kisame went in for one final attack.

There were eight left, and after Kisame's initial charge that number fell to six. Kisame had been hoping, praying really, that his initial attack and appearance would throw the others off-balance enough to give him a chance for a second attack before they could counter. Tragically, this didn't happen. The guards either didn't notice or care about Kisame's appearance, and were too far gone mentally to care about their physical safety. They charged in with reckless abandon, moving with form that Kisame would have laughed at, at any other time.

But Kisame was nearing complete exhaustion, and the greatest fighting form in the world wasn't much good when you were being charged at by drugged-up psychos with no regard for their own safety. No sooner had he slashed at one man with Samehada and spun around to attack another than the first man was charging again, blind to the pain from the gash on his arm. Kisame, on the other hand, had nothing in his system but the last little bit of his adrenaline to help mask the pain, and lack of food or rest had slowed his reaction times horrendously. Twice he was saved from decapitation through sheer dumb luck as he dodged about, and a guard losing his footing mid-attack was the only reason that Kisame had a gaping wound on his leg instead of his gut. But the shark was doing his fair share of damage as well, and even with the drugs in their system, none of the guards were strong enough to block or deflect a full swing from his sword.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Kisame only had two survivors to contend with, and both of these men had been horribly injured by him. He decided that was good enough and took off into the woods for the final time. The duo did their best to give chase, but they lacked Kisame's stamina at this point and were soon lost to the forest. Once the shark was certain he wasn't being pursued, he circled back around, backtracking through the woods and past his initial point of attack. He stopped long enough to set an explosive tag on the immobile armored truck, gave it a bit of distance, and set it off. The explosion would no doubt draw the survivors back here, meaning that Kisame's escape route would be left wide open. His job completed, he ran on to meet up with Itachi at their rendezvous point.

-n-

It was two days before Kisame was able to reunite with Itachi in a village out in the middle of nowhere. He picked up some food from a grocery store and then headed straight for the inn (this place was so tiny it only had the one), where he asked the front desk clerk if a man wearing a cloak like his had checked in recently. He must have been a terrifying sight, beaten and bruised, and he probably was a bit grumpy when he asked his question as well, because the girl quivered and stuttered her answer a moment later, confirming that Itachi was just down the hall as she handed him a spare room key with a shaky hand. Kisame grabbed the key and stomped off, leaving the poor girl whimpering in fear behind her counter. Hopefully that terror would keep her from mentioning their presence to anyone in town, at least; one could never be too careful of spies.

When he got to the door, Kisame jammed the key into the lock with more force than he probably needed to, opened the door, and slammed it shut a moment later. "I swear to god I'm gonna kill Pein when…we…shit, what happened to you?"

Kisame had been expecting Itachi to be relaxing in their room with a book, if he wasn't going over the mission details. At the moment, however, a slightly singed Itachi was currently stitching up a wound on his arm with a needle and thread, and he looked about as exhausted as Kisame felt. He'd set the needle down to reach for a knife (probably when he heard someone at the door), but put it back down upon seeing Kisame. "Our information was insufficient," he stated plainly, taking up the needle again.

"No kidding," Kisame growled as he dropped his sword on the ground and moved to sit by Itachi. "Who taught you how to do stitches? This is embarrassing."

"I can't use my dominant hand," Itachi explained calmly.

Kisame rolled his eyes. "Please tell me there's an extra needle and thread in there?" Itachi paused his handiwork again and opened the first aid kit, extracting and handing Kisame the items he wanted a moment later. "Thanks. God damn, this was supposed to be the easy part."

"What happened on your end?" Itachi asked.

"Oh, nothing much. Except it turns out that when Pein said, 'merchant guild' he really meant 'heavily fortified drug cartel,' and by a 'few merchants' along for the ride, he actually meant 'drugged out armed guards,' and by 'simple assignment,' he actually meant 'this is my attempt to kill you and Itachi as painfully as humanly possible.' But other than that, everything was great," Kisame explained with bitter sarcasm. "What about you? You were supposed to have the easier piece of this."

"Drug cartel makes sense now," Itachi commented, more to himself than Kisame. He finished his last stitch and set the needle down before snipping the thread with a small pair of scissors. "The second night of my stay with the second noble, there was an attack on his home. Someone must have prepped the whole place to burn, because by the time I woke up everything was already on fire. There must have been dozens of men attacking that night; I ran into a few in my haste to escape. They tried to follow me, and it took me a while to completely lose them. I only arrived here a bit before you."

Kisame sighed as he finished his own stitches, which were much more uniform and quickly done than Itachi's. "Did you get anything to eat before you got here?" Itachi shook his head, making Kisame roll his eyes. "Thought not. Here," he said, dropping a sandwich in his partner's lap. "Might as well eat."

Itachi quietly thanked his partner and unwrapped the food, nibbling cautiously at first to see if the food was still edible or not. Kisame, on the other hand, tore into his own food with fervent hunger, and was soon scarfing down his second sandwich while Itachi was finishing his first. It was only once both of them were done eating that the shark began to talk about their mission again. "I don't like this, Itachi. I don't care if Pein deliberately misled us or just didn't know better, two out of three parts of our assignment have already ended in near disasters, and those two parts were supposed to be easy. If we're dealing with a drug cartel, and their big drug run is in a few days, and they find out about what happened to their smaller shipment…"

"We'll be facing an army," Itachi concluded.

"Exactly! We need to contact Pein and get some extra manpower in here, or just-"

"No," Itachi stated firmly. "By the time reinforcements arrive, we'll have missed our chance to attack. And if we let them go, word will get back to their boss about Akatsuki involvement, and the entire organization will be at risk for months or years. You and I have to finish this ourselves."

"How?!"

"Simple," Itachi stated as he extracted a map from their mission file and spread it out on his lap to show Kisame. "I've been looking at a map of the area. Pein wants us to attack here (he pointed at the narrowest section of a mountain path) but if we wait until the caravan leaves the pass completely, we can attack here (he pointed to another map section)."

"Dare I ask why?"

"Look at the terrain," Itachi prompted. "And think about what your water techniques could do."

Kisame did as his partner asked, analyzing the map for a few moments. Suddenly, Itachi's plan clicked in his head; you could practically see the lightbulb go on in Kisame's mind. "Oh," he said with a wicked smile. "Now I see."

-n-

Just as the shark and weasel had feared, the next cartel transport was much more heavily fortified. There were now three armored trucks along with two dozen armored wagons, and every vehicle had six or eight men hanging around it, weapons draw as eyes darted around for any signs of the enemy. Most appeared to be professionals, given the way they carried themselves, but Kisame suspected that more than a few who were tweaking, even if he couldn't tell right now from this distance. He glanced to his right to look at Itachi, who was watching the entire caravan with Sharingan eyes. "Well?"

"Not yet," Itachi mumbled. "Wait until the last armored truck is a little closer."

Kisame sighed and hunkered down even further in the brush that was concealing him and his partner. The two had taken up a perch high above the enemy, which would be necessary for the next leg of their plan. Everything revolved on Kisame being able to use his techniques as soon as Itachi gave the command; otherwise their initial strike, their one chance of coming out of this assignment alive, would all be for naught-

"Now," Itachi snapped. Kisame's hands were forming the proper symbols almost before his mind could consciously register Itachi's command, and a moment later water was pouring down the side of the mountain.

What Itachi had noticed, and what the drug cartel had apparently been utterly ignorant of, was the fact that this side of the mountain was on the other side of the direction most weather fronts moved in from. The far side of the mountains and even parts of the mountain pass had lush vegetation thanks to plentiful rainfall, but this side was almost pure desert. As such, the ground was dried and packed down hard, covered with a fine layer of sand. Adding a little water would be enough to cause massive landslides or mudflows; adding the amount of water Kisame could summon up would surely bury the caravan.

The brilliance of Itachi's plan soon became apparent. The armored vehicles were built for protection from man, not nature, and were too slow and unwieldy to move out of the way before the mud came down and buried everything in a thick sludge. Most of the wagons were crushed under the weight of the earth, the wood and metal making terrible screeching and splintering sounds as it buckled. The guards, likewise, had been expecting another attack like what Kisame had carried out previously, and most were too shocked by the sudden mudslide to move out of the way until they were engulfed in the brown sludge.

Despite this excellent start, Kisame and Itachi couldn't celebrate just yet. Itachi's plan had disabled most of their enemies, but the caravan was simply too large for a single mudslide to destroy everything. Some wagons had gotten out of the way in time, and others had been too far back in the group to be damaged. Furthermore, not every wagon was completely buried, and if Kisame and Itachi left now, the guards would probably have everything dug out in a matter of hours. Now, they'd have to actually jump into the fray and fight.

To minimize the damage, Itachi would hang back and layer genjutsu after genjutsu onto their adversaries, and while the poor souls were confused Kisame would swoop in and finish them off. It was a good plan, provided that Itachi wasn't found while trying to put up his genjutsu. Oh, and there was the small matter that using genjutsu on this many adversaries at once could totally exhaust the Uchiha before the battle was over. Kisame would have to move fast in order for this plan to work. Itachi gave his partner a quick nod, and with that Kisame took off down the mountain, preparing to attack before the enemy could recover their bearings.

At first, it seemed to be working perfectly. By this point, Kisame could easily recognize the confused, glazed-over stares of anyone who'd become trapped in Itachi's genjutsus, and cut them down without mercy. Any time another guard moved too close to him, they'd suddenly stumble and freeze up, trapped by Itachi once they got too close to the shark. In a way, it was almost unfair.

But suddenly all the men around him seemed to snap back to their senses, and in an instant Kisame was fending off a good ten fighters at once. Damn, something must have happened to his partner. Kisame quickly summoned another pool of water (slightly smaller than the first) and clambered on top of it to buy some time for himself. From what he'd been able to see, most of these men weren't trained ninja, and so even if they could swim they wouldn't be able to walk on the water like him. He'd have the terrain advantage for a bit then, before the water drained away.

Kisame's plan worked wonderfully well, and whenever a guard popped up to the surface of the water for a breath of air, his head was quickly separated from the rest of him. Tragically the water began to recede almost as soon as it had been summoned; they were near a flat, open area, so there was nothing to hold the water in place, after all. At that point, Kisame once again found himself on muddy ground, looking around for any signs of the enemy or his partner. "Itachi?" he called out.

Screams from the other side of the battlefield alerted him that someone was still attacking the guards, and it was a safe bet that that someone was Itachi. He rushed off as quickly as he could over the slick terrain, wondering why Itachi was fighting directly and not hanging back like they'd planned.

He got his answer a moment later when a fireball nearly singed off his hair. Apparently there were a few ninjas in this group of guards, and while Kisame had been fighting the normal guards that were under Itachi's genjutsu, these ninjas had actively been looking for whoever was responsible for throwing up a genjutsu in the first place. Their attacks must have disrupted Itachi; normal fighters wouldn't be giving his partner so much trouble.

The weasel, to his credit, was holding his own even in the face of this many highly skilled opponents. He'd plucked a katana off of one of the deceased guards and was fighting hand to hand, Sharingan activated as his eyes darted around to track the dozen men that were still attacking him. Kisame took advantage of their distraction and cut one down almost immediately before injuring another. "Itachi, same thing as before!" he called out just as the other ninjas were becoming aware of his presence.

The Uchiha's reaction was immediate. Kisame couldn't see the genjutsu, but whatever Itachi threw up then was powerful enough that Kisame could practically _feel_ it radiating out, freezing the ninjas and sending Itachi to his knees. Kisame had been worried that his partner's abilities, as amazing as they surely were, couldn't handle a challenge like this. Trapping a dozen trained ninjas in an imaginary world for any period of time would be incredibly draining, and there was a good chance that Itachi would break before the ninjas managed to free themselves.

Kisame did his part to alleviate this struggle by moving quickly, swinging Samehada with skilled ease and not even attempting to drag out the fight (if you could even call it such at this point). One swipe to remove the head, run to the next target, swipe, move, rinse and repeat until everything was dead.

By the time the last one had fallen to the ground, blood spurting out of the gaping hole where his head used to be attached to the rest of his body, Itachi was bent forward with hands on his knees for support. Kisame replaced Samehada on his back and came over to his partner, kneeling down to inspect the damage. "Can you move?"

Itachi shook his head, trembling from the exertion of using his abilities so extensively. "Give me a moment."

"Stay put, I'll take care of whatever's left of the cartel." Kisame looked around quickly to make sure that there was no one close enough to present an immediate threat to his partner, and then began searching up and down the caravan to make sure that there were no survivors.

It took him nearly an hour, mostly because he made a point to stab all the corpses he found just to be sure no one was playing dead. After that, whatever wagons he could access were partially dug out and set ablaze, successfully destroying the precious cargo within. Anything that he couldn't dig out was likely to be too costly to salvage, so he was willing to leave them behind. In addition, a few guards might have slipped away (he and Itachi had no idea of what their total headcount had been, and most of the dead were buried under several meters of mud now so their bodies couldn't be accounted for), but overall Kisame was willing to call this mission a success. Now he just had to check on his partner and see how the weasel was doing.

Itachi was able to get to his feet when Kisame approached; he probably wouldn't be running a marathon anytime soon, but at least he'd been able to move to wherever they decided to take shelter next. "Good, you're up. We need to get moving."

"Hn," Itachi agreed. He started to move towards the road, heading back the way they had come initially, but was stopped by a hand on his shoulder. Curious, he looked up to Kisame's face. "What?"

"The mission's done," Kisame stated plainly. "Time to fess up."

One second passed in silence.

Two seconds.

Three.

And then:

"Are you kidding me."

Kisame was about to snap, to ask Itachi if the weasel thought he'd been joking when he'd asked for an explanation, but was stopped by Itachi grabbing his hair, pulling him down to eye-level, and then staring into Kisame's eyes with his Sharingan at point-blank range.

Kisame felt himself being pulled into the Tsukuyomi a second later; he'd never been the victim of this jutsu before, but he could just sense from how powerful the technique was that this could only be one of Itachi's most powerful attacks. He was frozen, either from fear or Itachi's power, as an illusionary version of the weasel stared up at him with fury. "How can one person be so dense," he snapped. "It's painfully obvious to everyone in this world except you, because you simply don't want to see it. You're either blind or completely incompetent, and at this point it doesn't matter which. You want an explanation? Fine. I'll give you one."

" _Huh_ ," Kisame thought to himself. " _So this is how I die_."

"You want me to answer your question," Itachi went on. "You want me to explain why I knew you'd save me. Because, Kisame, everything you'd done up until that point in our partnership indicated that you would act that way."

"What-"

"You are a blood-thirsty killer at heart. You see people in terms of strong and weak, of useful or useless, and only part of that is because of your training. But what exactly does useful or useless mean to you? What actually makes you want to keep a partner around?"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?!"

Itachi sighed angrily, seeing that his point wasn't getting through. "Kisame, when we eat at a restaurant, where do you sit? When we get a hotel room, which bed do you sleep in?"

"How the hell would I know?! And what does that have to do with anything?!"

"When we're eating at a restaurant, you always sit between me and the door. Any normal ninja would want to sit so that they could observe the door at all times, but on multiple occasions you've positioned yourself to face away from the door if it means you'll be sitting between me and it. In a hotel, you invariably pick the bed closest to the door as well, unless we're in a room with a window (in which case, you sleep between me and the window). Both of those actions go against ninja protocol, Kisame; I know because I received the same training as you. So tell me, why would you deliberately throw all that training to the side again and again? Why not alternate with me and split the danger?"

"I didn't even know I was doing it!" Kisame shot back.

"Part of you did," Itachi stated. "Given how much you go on about basic ninja protocol, there's no way you could have been completely oblivious to it."

"I-"

"You pester me all the time," Itachi went on, ignoring his partner's obvious distress. "You complain about how little I eat. How little I sleep. How I overwork my eyes. And before you can try to justify that by saying it's to ensure success on the mission, you do these things even when we have weeks off between assignments. Why is that, Kisame?"

"I don't-"

"You fret over me. You protect me. You rely on me being there with you. I knew you'd come back to save me because everything you'd done for me up until that point in time indicated that you were utterly incapable of leaving me to my fate."

"Itachi-"

"You care about me, Kisame," Itachi spat out. "It's plain in everything you do. You try to bury it with scathing remarks or roundabout insults, but you care. And here's the thing, Kisame; if I were an ordinary partner, you wouldn't do any of this. You would have left me face-down in a ditch a long time ago if that were the case. So why am I so special to you? What makes you want to come back for me? Why do you rush into a fight if it means saving me? When saving me is the only good thing that would come from you fighting in the first place? Well? Have you figured it out yet?"

"…Oh crap."

Suddenly the illusionary world shattered around them, and a severely weakened Itachi collapsed against Kisame's chest. "You love me," he concluded, voice barely more than a whisper. "idiot."

Kisame's arm automatically shot out to catch his partner as Itachi passed out and collapsed. He stared at the Uchiha's unconscious body, trying desperately to process everything that he'd been told. It was impossible. There was no way…no way in hell that he…

But the more he thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. He'd always been frustrated with Itachi's self-destructive behavior, for reasons he could never discern. He'd always needed to know where his partner was on the battlefield, even when it had no bearing on his own success in the mission. And aside from all that, there had always been something about Itachi that drew him in more than any other partner. Something that made him watch Itachi, occasionally worry, and ultimately go back for his injured partner rather than waiting for Pein to assign him someone new.

Shit, he didn't have time to think about this now. He and Itachi needed to get out of here and find somewhere to rest, before anything else could go horribly wrong on this utter fiasco of a mission. He sighed and hefted Itachi into his arms, unwilling to wake his partner back up (and rather unsure if he could even do it at this point). He needed to get the two of them far away from this area, and quickly. "Damn kid slowing me down again," he grumbled as he took off down the path from the direction the caravan had come.

-n-

Itachi was unconscious for almost six hours; plenty of time for Kisame to move them, find a dry cave to hide in, and catch some fish for dinner while Itachi dozed. By the time his partner awoke, the fish were cooking over the flames of a small fire, and were practically ready to serve.

Kisame gave his partner a moment to assess his surroundings and sit up before he said anything. "Hey."

Itachi looked over his shoulder at the sound of Kisame's voice and quickly located his partner. He turned around slowly, not quite meeting Kisame's eyes as he scooted over to sit closer to the fire. "Hn."

"Feeling better?"

Itachi nodded and took one of the fish that had finished cooking away from the fire, nibbling on it while rotating the stick the fish had been cooked on.

Several minutes passed in silence as the two of them ate, before Kisame finally took a deep breath and began to speak. "Ok, here's how this conversation is going to go. First off, you're going to apologize for dragging me into your private mental torture chamber just to make a point."

"Sorry," Itachi mumbled through a mouthful of fish.

"All right. Do that again and I'll break every bone in your body. Second…ok, I like you. Way more than I probably should. So, how do you feel?"

"I like you," Itachi immediately replied.

Kisame nodded, taking a minute to process the answer. "Were you ever going to tell me?"

Itachi looked a bit more uncomfortable now. "I couldn't risk causing unnecessary friction between the two of us, so I wanted to see if you felt anything towards me. I started paying attention to your actions to see if there were any signs of affection on your part. That was when I started noticing the fretting and your positioning whenever we were outside of the base."

"Ok. Wait, how do you know you weren't just noticing the times I did something nice and ignoring when I did something else?"

Itachi cleared his throat, cheeks turning slightly red. "I…kept a log of everything you did for me. For six months."

"…"

"…"

"Itachi, that's pretty-"

"Insane, I know. I had to be sure."

Kisame leaned back against the wall of the cave, thinking. "So there's no chance it was just coincidence."

"Who's sitting closer to the mouth of the cave right now?" Itachi asked. Kisame was suddenly aware that he'd once again placed himself between Itachi and any possible threats, and swore. "See? Honestly I was shocked that you didn't realize you were doing this, Kisame."

"Right, because I'm a complete moron as you've stated several times today." Kisame shook his head, incredulous at the frankly insane situation he'd found himself in. "So, what happens next?"

"I'm not expecting a relationship, if that's what you're asking," Itachi replied. "You wanted an answer, and I gave it to you. Take some time to process what you want to do, and we'll figure it out later."

"That's…surprisingly understanding, considering."

"Considering what?"

"Well you've apparently had a thing for me for ages, so I thought-"

"You being aware of your feelings is good enough for now," Itachi interjected.

Kisame chose not to press the issue, and instead grabbed another cooked fish from the fire. He and Itachi leaned back against the wall of the cave, eating. A minute later, he blurted out, "So do you want to have sex with me or is this gonna be one of those weird things where you're emotionally attached but not physically attracted?"

Itachi choked on his fish and began coughing, prompting Kisame to offer his canteen to the Uchiha to clear his throat. "I'd like to have sex," Itachi stated, cheeks very red now, either from embarrassment or choking. "Part of why I like you is based on physical attraction."

"All right, just wanted to be clear," Kisame clarified. For a time, there was silence in the cave except for the crackling of the fire as the two ninja let the weight of this new development between them sink in. There would be time to decide what to do next, whether to try a relationship or not; but at the moment, neither of the ninjas were in good enough shape to really consider such heavy prospects. And so instead, Kisame switched gears to another line of discussion. "So, how are we gonna kill Pein when we get back to the base?"

"Painfully," Itachi immediately replied.

"Well obviously, but how? I'm in favor of dropping him into a pit of spikes."

"Tie him to a log and float it downstream," Itachi suggested, reaching for another fish.

"Better idea. Stake him to the ground and then cover him in honey and fire ants."

Itachi actually chuckled at that one with a slight smile. "Where would we get fire ants?"

"Ok, maybe just regular ants…"

And thus, for a while at least, Kisame and Itachi were able to put their problems aside. They were exhausted, bruised, half-covered in mud, and emotionally confused on top of everything else. But right then, there was peace in their lives. For now, as they recovered from one hell of a mission in that tiny cave, the pair just focused on eating their dinner and coming up with increasingly complicated ways to vicious murder their incompetent leader.


	4. Chapter 4

_A.N.: The author regrets nothing, although she really should. Seriously, I completely lost control of these two by the end of the chapter, but I liked it enough to keep the bits where they're a bit OOC, so please forgive me and enjoy this for what it is._

 _"It really shouldn't be this hard to decide_ ," Kisame thought to himself. " _Really it shouldn't."_

The swordsman sighed as he leaned back against an oak tree and stared up into the canopy of the forest around him, wondering how in god's name things had gotten so complicated. All right, so he liked Itachi. Really, really liked Itachi. Liked Itachi to the point where he was unwittingly putting himself at risk to protect his partner with alarming frequency. And apparently Itachi returned that sentiment, even going so far as to suggest a relationship (ok, the r-word had been brought up in reference to what Itachi _wasn't_ demanding, but he still brought it up in the first place!) before he directly stated that he wanted sex with Kisame. So why not give it a shot? What was keeping Kisame from taking the plunge and seeing where things could go?

A great number of things, if you wanted the honest truth. The biggest issue to Kisame was the fact that anything he started with Itachi would almost certain have a short lifespan before its inevitable expiration date. Rogue ninjas didn't live very long once they abandoned their villages, that was fact; ignoring the outlier that was Kakuzu, Kisame himself was already on the upper end of the life expectancy for someone in their line of work. Without fail, every rogue ninja would eventually encounter a situation that they couldn't get out of, if the group or organization they were allied with didn't decide to dispose of them first. Supposing that the swordsman somehow managed to avoid both these fates, Kisame's own body would soon become unable to keep up with the speed and skills of younger ninjas, and he'd have to retire to a position of handling the logistics of illicit missions, rather than doing the work himself. Frankly, the shark would rather fall on his own sword than meet such a fate.

But suppose that Kisame ignored all of that, and decided a relationship with Itachi was worth however little time they had. What if choosing to date his partner was itself a course of action destined for failure? Kisame had never had anything close to a serious relationship back in his home village of Kirigakure, mostly due to his physical attributes frightening off any potential partners. The vast majority of the time, he settled for one-night stands with hired sex workers because it was easiest course of action in his line of work, since for the right price, the men and women he sought out could ignore his blue skin and hair. What Itachi would want (and honestly, what he'd want) would be something completely different: an actual relationship, with dates and anniversaries and affection. And if that went south, their entire partnership could fall into jeopardy.

Kisame rose to his feet and took hold of Samehada, which had been leaning against the tree beside him while he rested. When you laid out even a few of the problems like that, it was painfully obvious that a lot of things could go wrong, should Kisame decide to pursue anything with the Uchiha. Really, logic dictated that he should give up while he could, turn Itachi down, and try to have things return to normal between them (or as normal as they ever got when Kisame and Itachi were involved). And yet…

There was something about Itachi that drew him in. Kisame knew that was a terrible excuse; it was a horrendously cliché phrase that sad old women with twenty cats would put in their romance novels when they couldn't come up with an actual concrete reason for two characters being attracted to one another. And for many years, he'd written off anyone that defended their relationships with that statement. Yet thinking about Itachi, the best words to describe his attraction was that Itachi somehow managed to pull him in without even trying. Everything about the Uchiha was enticing, from his looks to his fighting to the way he spoke and carried himself in the presence of others. Why else would Kisame be so obsessed with looking after his partner? Why else was he so willing to work with a ninja so many years younger than him? And most importantly, why else had Itachi become the centerpiece of his fantasies whenever he wanted to jack off?

"Kisame?"

The shark turned around to see his partner standing a few feet away, manila folder in hand. Itachi knew to keep his distance when Kisame was training; get too close when Samehada was being swung around, and you were more likely than not to lose a limb. But at the moment, Kisame's weapon wasn't in use, and the two of them had more important things to worry about than a possible maiming; namely, the folder in Itachi's hand. Kisame's stomach sank at the sight; he and Itachi had barely had a week to recover, and Pein was already sending them out again? "Please tell me there's nothing in that folder about drug cartels."

Itachi shook his head and, upon realizing that Samehada was not in imminent danger of colliding with his ribcage, walked closer to hand Kisame the folder. "We're being sent on a reconnaissance mission. There's a possible lead on the seven-tailed beast."

Kisame took the folder and resisted the urge to roll his eyes. If he had a nickel for every time the Akatsuki got a well-meaning but completely bogus tip on the location of a tailed beast, he could've used the funds to flee the country and retire in luxury ages ago. Nine times out of ten, these recon missions were a complete and utter waste of time, but the Akatsuki members still had to investigate each and every one of them, on the off chance that one of them actually panned out. At least they were easy to do, if a bit boring. "All right, when do we leave?"

"Pein wants us to leave by tomorrow afternoon, if possible."

"Tch, 'if possible'? The guy's being pretty generous."

"Perhaps he's still concerned that you'll, what was it? 'Stick your fist down his throat and pull out his stomach through his mouth if he ever sends us on a suicide mission like that again,' I believe?"

"You were thinking it too, but I actually had the balls to say it." Itachi shook his head and turned to go back to the base, presumably to start packing for the mission. Reconnaissance missions might have been easy, but they could take weeks and would require several changes of clothing, even if they stopped to wash their clothes when they could. But before Itachi could take three steps, Kisame was speaking again. "Itachi."

The Uchiha stopped and turned halfway around to look at his partner. "Hn?"

"I swear I'm still thinking about what you said. Just give me a little more time, ok?"

Itachi nodded and turned back around without a word, leaving Kisame to his thoughts. Not that that was very helpful to the swordsman at this point. Kisame groaned to himself once Itachi was out of sight. "Why did you have to push him for an answer? Life was simpler before you had answers. You didn't wake up with a hard-on for your partner before you had answers," he grumbled. It was with a shake of his head and a sigh that Kisame set aside the folder and resumed his exercises, chastising himself all the while.

-n-

The first week of their assignment, which consisted of trekking to Wave Country along the most boring dirt road in all of creation, was mercifully free of any danger. Not a single ninja accosted them on the way there, and no one they encountered along their journey recognized either Itachi or Kisame. They stuck to older forest paths as best they could, hunting for food and taking shelter wherever they could to save money, and no matter what kind of cave or clearing they ended up in, their hideaways were also free of any danger too. However, the trip was still horrendously awful for the pair of ninjas for one simple reason: it was wet. Incredibly wet. Cruelly, utterly, unforgivingly wet. Every single day that Itachi and Kisame had to travel, rain poured down from the heavens in absolute buckets, occasionally lightening up to a slight drizzle for a bit (if they were lucky). The first few days were manageable; ninjas were expected to be able to handle inclement weather, after all. By day five, the two were getting a bit annoyed at the weather, but they were still holding up. However, by day seven the both of them were sick and tired of being soaking wet, and Kisame, for his part, had had enough.

The shark stumbled as his foot went into a deceptively deep puddle, drenching his already soaked leg up to his knee. "God damnit!"

He pulled his foot free and spun around to look at Itachi. The poor Uchiha looked so small, drenched from head to toe with his soaked clothing clinging to his slight frame, and despite what was obviously an incredibly uncomfortable situation, he was bravely trying (and failing miserably) not to shiver from the cold. Kisame took a minute to consider their state of affairs, and made an executive decision right there in the middle of the road. "Fuck it. We're stopping somewhere until this rain quits."

Under normal circumstances Itachi would have been the voice of reason and pointed out that Sir Leader was expecting the pair of them to reach their destination in just a few more days, and the rain didn't appear likely to stop anytime soon. However, he was soaked to the bone, freezing, exhausted, and overall much less willing or able to put up with the elements than Kisame, so he didn't utter a single protest at Kisame's suggestion. The pair of them kept walking for another hour, until they reached a village that was just big enough to have an inn and a few restaurants. Kisame quickly paid for the room (the clerk frowned at their sopping wet currency as it dripped onto the front desk, but seemed to understand), and the two of them immediately made their way to a room at the very back of the inn.

Itachi quickly dropped his bag and ducked into the bathroom as soon as they were through the door. Moments later, Kisame could hear the sound of the shower going; his partner was probably trying to warm up, and the shark wasn't about to protest. Instead, he peeled his clothes off and hung them up by the radiator as he dried himself off with the comforter from one of the beds. He reached for his bag, prepared to pull out another outfit, and then swore when he realized that everything he had packed was soaked through as well. Mother Nature could be a mean bitch when she wanted to be.

Kisame looked over by the door where Itachi had dropped his bag, which now had a small puddle forming underneath it. Great, they were both without dry clothes for now. Shaking his head, Kisame dumped out both bags, strung up one of Itachi's outfits beside his on the radiator, and then spread out the rest of their clothing to dry on the desk tucked into the corner of the room. It wasn't ideal, but at least they were sheltered now and were free from being absolutely waterlogged for the first time in ages. With nothing else to do, Kisame stretched out on the bed underneath a comforter and attempted to dry out the pages of their now incredibly soggy mission report.

Itachi emerged from the bathroom a bit later in a cloud of steam, one towel wrapped around his head and another around his waist. He stepped out and reached down towards his bag, only to discover that it had been emptied. He looked around the room until he noticed his clothes hanging by the radiator, and turned his head towards Kisame with a surprised look on his face. "Did you…"

"Everything's soaking wet," Kisame grumbled. "Even the mission report. And we can't go back out for food in soaking wet clothes, because every respectable store or restaurant around here would kick us out. Give it another fifteen, twenty minutes for our clothes to dry, and we'll grab something to eat."

"Thank you," Itachi replied as he took a seat on the bed opposite Kisame.

"Don't mention it," Kisame said as he got up from the bed. "I'm gonna shower now, ok?"

"…Ok…"

Kisame noticed the odd lilt in Itachi's voice but didn't comment on it as he stepped into the bathroom. It was only after he'd shut the door and turned on the shower that he realized he'd walked to the bathroom completely naked, not ten feet from his partner. "Oh crap."

-n-

Half an hour later, Kisame and Itachi were both reasonably dry and very hungry, so they left their room at the inn and tracked down a restaurant just a block away. Kisame ordered more food than their budget might have allowed for, but at this point the two of them were too tired and hungry to care. Pein could be the one to discuss budget issues with Kakuzu, since at the end of the day this was all his doing (why yes, the pair of them _were_ still quite angry about the whole "nearly murdered by a drug cartel" incident, but that was quite beside the point. Really.)

Their waitress brought them plates full of shish kabobs a bit later, and both of them eagerly dug in. Kisame gruffly asked her to keep the food coming, and Itachi shot her an apologetic look as she scurried away towards the kitchen, looking as though she honestly feared that the shark-like man would lunge for her next. "So, what are the odds that the rain stops by tomorrow?" Kisame asked through a mouthful of food.

Itachi shrugged as he nibbled on his own food. Hungry as he may be, the Uchiha still had proper table manners. "I'd assume we'll be here for another day, maybe two."

Kisame rolled his eyes; great, more wasting time on an already time-wasting assignment. "Perfect. How good are you at charades?"

Itachi shot him a look, clearly taking offense at the mere suggestion that he'd engage in childish games like that, but before he could make any comment their waitress returned with more food. Kisame quickly exchanged his empty plate for the woman's full one, and began to eat the fresh shish kabobs (albeit with a bit less gusto than before). Itachi shook his head; he'd barely gotten halfway through his first plate at that point. Kisame was quick to notice this, and pointed towards Itachi's plate with a skewer in his hand. "Eat."

"I am."

"That's not eating, that's picking. Seriously, the food's paid for and this is the best we'll eat for weeks, so just-"

"Why do you care about me?"

Kisame blinked at his partner, who currently had his eyes fixed on his plate. "Huh?"

Itachi glanced up, carefully observing his partner's face. "The way you always fret over me; why? I haven't had anyone worry about me this way since I was a small child. In fact, I'm quite certain that there was a rumor going around during my time in ANBU that I'd gut anyone with my katana if I heard them fussing over me."

"Really? Because you seem more like the, 'set everything on fire to destroy all the evidence' type to me."

Itachi chose to ignore that comment. "But then I met you, and suddenly I have someone in my life who's worrying about what I eat, when I sleep, everything. Why is that, Kisame?"

Kisame set down his kebob and thought for a minute before answering. "I've been thinking about that. Honestly? A big part of it is because when we first met, you seemed so fragile. Like I'd heard that I'd be working with someone who'd wiped out a super powerful clan from Konohagakure, and I was expecting someone a bit more…"

"Imposing?" Itachi suggested.

"Pretty much, yeah. Honestly, I thought you'd last maybe a week before something killed you and I'd have to get a different partner. No offense to you, it wasn't the first time Pein had hyped up a potential partner and then said partner ended up smeared all over the road before we were done with our first assignment. But surprise surprise, you were incredibly competent and really good at not getting yourself killed, so I started to like you. I guess I just wanted to keep you around for a bit, that's all."

"I see," Itachi murmured as he took another bite.

"Does it bother you?"

"The worrying?"

"Yeah, what else?"

Itachi shook his head. "It's a nice change of pace, working with someone that cares about you."

Kisame smirked; although his partner was trying to be nonchalant, he was clearly uncomfortable talking about things like this so openly. "Well, aren't you just the sweetest."

Itachi rolled his eyes at the sickly sweet voice, taking a moment to finish off the kebob he was currently eating. "I like having you around too."

"Is this the part where you tell me how much you worry about me too?" Kisame asked, still smirking.

Itachi shook his head and reached for another kebob. "There's no reason to worry. I'm more than capable of keeping the both of us safe."

Kisame blinked in surprise at the Uchiha's answer. "Wow."

"Hn?"

"That was…pretty cocky."

"It's not cocky if I can back up the claim," Itachi asserted, taking another nibble of his food. "I won't let anything happen to you." That statement was followed by Itachi's cheeks turning slightly pink.

"Also being pretty forward here."

Itachi gave Kisame a look that started out as exasperation and morphed into something bordering amusement. "Being subtle and hoping you'd pick up on cues certainly didn't work. Being direct seems to produce better results."

Kisame snorted and shook his head. He couldn't help it; the way that Itachi was simultaneously so sincere and clinically straightforward was just endearing enough not to be frustrating. Kisame had briefly wondered if Itachi would act like a blushing virgin around him, once the Uchiha's feelings were revealed, but if anything putting the truth out there had given Itachi even more confidence around his partner, and given him more incentive to be as forward with Kisame as he could without making things awkward (though he'd yet to completely halt his blushing when being so forward).

Kisame would be lying if he said that it didn't turn him on a bit.

The swordsman's line of thinking was interrupted as he noticed that Itachi had finally managed to eat everything on his plate, which prompted Kisame to move a kebob from his plate to Itachi's. "Seriously, eat."

Itachi nodded and reached for the food, gently brushing Kisame's fingers with his own. Neither man said anything, and Itachi slowly withdrew his hand a moment later. Afterwards, Kisame wondered if he should've done something. He wasn't entirely sure what that something might be, but their interaction just felt…incomplete.

-n-

The rain had all but stopped by the following evening, and Itachi and Kisame were forced to depart from their warm, dry hotel room before the weather had a chance to turn unpleasant once again. The rest of the trip to their destination was mostly free from rain, but the air was still damp (and somewhat chilly, now that they were travelling to a higher altitude). If Kisame was being honest, it sucked.

Reaching their destination didn't improve things either. Of course their lead turned out to be a dead end, and of course every shred of information they attempted to scrape together after losing their lead was flimsy at best and produced no tangible results. It turned out to be two weeks of time-wasting interrogations, searches in low-lighting as they browsed through books with tiny print, and sleeping in cramped, dingy quarters. Oh, and by the time they finally left to get back to their base, it started raining again.

Rather than try to tough out the weather for another week, Kisame and Itachi unanimously decided to call it quits on day three and take shelter in an inn. It was cheap and a bit musty, but at least the pair of them would be able to dry themselves out here. "Why the hell do you have to be a wanted criminal in Fire Country?" Kisame grumbled as he whipped off his shirt and flung it in the approximate direction of the room's radiator. "Seriously, Fire Country is perfectly dry and sunny around this time of year. We could be sunning ourselves right now, Itachi. In the _sun_. Do you even remember what that looks like?"

Itachi had gone into the bathroom at some point during Kisame's grumbling and was now tossing his own clothes out into the main room, likely hoping that Kisame would be kind enough to hang them up to dry. "You're wanted in Wave Country," he countered as the shower turned on in the background. "Yet here we are."

"Yeah, but it's been years since I pissed off anyone important around here," Kisame stated, scooping up his partner's clothes to lay out to dry by his own. "Your murders are still pretty fresh in everyone's minds, you know? I walk around and avoid the wrong people in the wrong places, and no one bats an eye. Plus, if anyone remembers anything about me, it's that people who get on my bad side tend to lose a limb or three." Kisame thought he heard a soft chuckle through the door, making him smirk to himself. "Hey, I'm going to order some dinner for us. Any preferences?"

"Hn."

Kisame took that as a sign that he was allowed to order whatever he wanted, and quickly set about doing so. The menus tucked into the bedside table came from a variety of restaurants, but the only one that really stuck out to Kisame was a local ramen vendor that guaranteed that hot food would be delivered in under thirty minutes, or it was free. He grabbed the phone from the table nearby and quickly placed a call, ordering about half the items on the menu (hey, walking in freezing cold rain worked up an appetite!)

Twenty minutes later, Kisame was spreading out a dozen cartons of food on his bed, and Itachi was just stepping out of the shower and toweling off his hair. He gave the food cartons a long stare, before glancing up towards Kisame with a small frown on his face. "It's not like I can't eat all this," Kisame stated with a shrug.

"Kakuzu is going to kill you."

Kisame probably could've taken the easy way out and claimed that Pein was actually going to have to deal with the banker, since Kisame had already decided to fob off everything expenditure-wise about this mission onto their leader, but instead found himself saying, "Well it's a good thing I've got you to keep me safe, isn't it?"

Itachi blushed slightly and quickly stepped past the shark to check on his clothing. "Don't tempt fate."

"What? Afraid to take on our dear sweet banker?" Kisame snickered. "He's gotten much more mellow since he started fucking Hidan, you know."

"I'll take your word for it." Itachi picked up a pair of pants that were mostly dry and pulled them on before walking to the bed and selecting a box of noodles and a container of beef broth. He dumped the noodles in and walked back across the room, taking a seat on the desk since there was no table to sit at.

Kisame decided to let the matter drop. Instead, he picked up a nearby carton of food and tossed it to Itachi, who just barely managed to catch it with one hand. "Here. Got those for you."

Itachi picked open the top of the container and looked inside, before glancing up and quirking a brow at his partner. "Steamed vegetables."

Kisame shrugged. "You need to eat them more."

"Kisame-"

"Look, it's like you said, being subtle didn't get us anywhere," Kisame stated, sitting up a little straighter on his bed. For some reason, the shark's posture always improved whenever he felt an obligation to defend himself, or found himself in close proximity to Itachi. "You know I worry about you, I know I worry about you, so here's me worrying about you. Eat veggies, avoid getting scurvy, live another day, blah blah blah."

"…I was actually wondering if this was your way of keeping that extra container of grilled chicken to yourself."

"Oh. Well. That, ah, may have been part of my motive…" Itachi gave his partner a thoroughly unimpressed look. "But my intentions were mostly good!" Even less impressed. "Really Itachi, would I lie to you?" Now the look was something bordering on pity. "Oh fuck you, here's the chicken."

Itachi smirked as Kisame hurled the chicken at his head, managing to catch it again with one hand. Kisame went back to his food as Itachi dumped the chicken and the vegetables together on top of his noodles. They ate in comfortable silence for a while, the only sound being the pitter patter of rain on the inn's rather thin roof. Itachi suddenly chuckled and smiled to himself, staring into the container of steamed vegetables sitting beside him. "What?" Kisame asked.

Itachi stayed quiet for a moment, and Kisame wondered if his question was about to be blow off. Then Itachi's eyes moved towards his food, and he began slowly stirring the noodles with his chopsticks. "There aren't any watercress in this mix."

"Uh, yeah, I asked them not to give us any."

"I'm allergic to watercress."

"Yeah, I know, it was in your file. Kind of the whole reason I told them to leave it out." Itachi chuckled at this, confusing Kisame further. "Not really sure what's funny about the idea of you going into anaphylactic shock here, Itachi."

Itachi shook his head, still smiling. "I had a lover in Konoha. One night, when we were eating dinner, he tried to serve me stir fry with watercress in it. I'd told him a dozen times about the allergy, but…"

"So?"

"We'd been together for six months," Itachi explained, going back to staring at his noodles, "but he couldn't even remember that I was deathly allergic to something. And here you are, when we're not even dating, and you go out of your way to make sure whatever we have is safe for me to eat." He glanced towards Kisame, and if the shark didn't know his partner as well as he did, he'd almost call the look shy. "You're actually sweet sometimes. Think of what our enemies would say if they knew about this."

"Well now I've got to slip some watercress into your food tomorrow," Kisame stated, though the smirk on his face gave away the lie. "Can't have anyone thinking I've gone soft."

It was probably only through sheer Uchiha stubbornness that Itachi resisted the urge to roll his eyes right then. "Kisame, no one who's ever seen you would think you're soft."

Kisame grinned, pointed teeth gleaming in the rapidly dwindling twilight. "Good. Rough life like ours, you have to stay pretty hard."

It was around the time that Itachi began choking on his noodles that Kisame realized what he'd just said, and how certain people might misconstrue that statement. "Crap, I didn't mean it like that! Don't get me wrong, you're definitely attractive, and I'm a normal healthy guy, but given that we're still trying to, you know, and then there's-"

"Why are you still talking?" Itachi mumbled, head buried in one hand while the other clenched around his food for dear life.

"Right. Shutting up now."

There were a few minutes of awkward silence, before Kisame cleared his throat and stood up. "I have to…you know…" he vaguely motioned towards the door.

"Hn."

Kisame walked towards the door, deciding that maybe a little time away from his partner might be in their best interest (specifically his own, after that embarrassing torrent of word vomit). He'd opened the door and had one foot outside of the room, when Itachi spoke again and stopped him mid-step. "Kisame?"

The shark looked over his shoulder. "Yeah?"

Itachi's face was completely devoid of emotion as he looked straight into Kisame's eyes. "I'm glad I haven't made you _go soft_."

And then Kisame was out the door and down the hall with the slam of a door and a few hurried steps, cursing whatever gods existed for sticking him with such a cheeky bastard for a partner. Itachi, for his part, smirked to himself and went back to eating his dinner, his cheeks red as cherries now.

-n-

The rain never truly stopped, but it did let up enough that delaying their trip home any longer simply wouldn't be excusable. Itachi and Kisame both trudged along in soggy misery for another week before they finally made it back to the base, dropped a sopping wet mission report on Pein's desk, and finally made it back to their rooms.

"I'm sick of being wet," Kisame stated as he stepped into the room. The two of them had managed to break free of the rain a little while ago, so at least their clothing was only damp and not completely drenched this time. "Our next assignment better be in a desert."

Itachi ignored his partner's complaints and walked towards his dresser. He quickly peeled off his damp clothing and selected a dry outfit from within, no doubt hating the cold and damp as much as Kisame (though not wanting to admit it out loud).

The shark (somewhat creepily) watched as Itachi got changed, thinking. Finally, when his partner was completely dressed and moving further into the room, he spoke again. "Itachi."

"Hn?"

"That mission was a complete and utter waste of time."

"Hn."

"I'm serious. And you know what? Most of these missions that Pein sticks us with are," Kisame went on, peeling out of his own wet clothes before he began rummaging through his own dresser. "We fight, we come home, we do recon, we come home, we nearly get ourselves killed on a pretty regular basis, and we come home. That's our life."

"Kisame?"

"I like you," he blurted out, hastily tugging on a dry pair of pants. "And you like me. Do you have any idea how rare that is in our line of work? We could have something. And maybe it'll be short-lived, maybe it'll fizzle out, but by god, at least our lives might suck a little less if we had each other."

"Kisame-"

"Like, have you realized how much more enjoyable camping in a cave would be if we could cuddle up together? How taking a break to make out in the middle of our research might have made that mission more bearable? Itachi," Kisame went on, putting two hands on his partner's shoulders and leaning in close, face utterly serious, "there was a perfectly good bathroom counter in that last hotel room that we could have had sex on." Ok, that last part was probably a bit much, but apparently being blunt and direct was their thing now, so Kisame was hoping his partner would just roll with it.

For someone who was being rather bluntly propositioned, Itachi remained surprisingly calm and impassive. "To be clear, are you saying you want a relationship?"

"Yes, damn it, so can-"

Kisame had erroneously expected Itachi to be rather calm and restrained about their getting together, perhaps needing a few dates and a bit of gentle prodding from the shark before their relationship progressed to the physical level. That notion went flying out the window, never to be seen or heard from again, sometime between when Itachi launched himself at Kisame, kissing the older man passionately and wrapping his legs around Kisame's waist, and when Itachi's hand found its way to the fly of Kisame's pants and began fumbling with the zipper there.

Kisame quickly made the decision to move Itachi to the desk at the foot of his bed and set the Uchiha down there, lips working frantically against Itachi's as he slid one hand down the weasel's back to cup his ass and the other slipped around the front to grope Itachi through his zipper. "Fucking pants," he muttered as he managed to undo the fly and slipped free of Itachi's legs just long enough to slide Itachi's pants and underwear down and off. At that point he fused his lips against Itachi's and wrapped his hands around Itachi's waist to pull him closer, growling into the kiss.

Itachi, for his part, had managed to get Kisame's pants undone and jerked them down to mid-thigh, allowing him to slide his hands down the shark's abs, around his hips and over his ass before finally slipping forward to lightly wrap around Kisame's dick.

Kisame managed to pull his mouth away from Itachi and immediately moved down to bite at Itachi's neck. Normally he'd ask his sex partners if they were ok with him leaving some rather shark-like dental impressions on their skin, but normally his partners didn't skip straight to third base before you could say "handjob," so he figured he was allowed to take certain liberties tonight.

Plus, given the way that Itachi whimpered and jerked in his arms when he bit down, trying to drag Kisame closer and bite at his ear, the swordsman had a pretty good feeling that his partner was ok with this.

Kisame scraped his teeth over the soft skin of Itachi's neck, licking with his tongue as his lips sucked a mark into his partner's neck. There was going to be at least one hickey on his partner tomorrow; the possibility of getting to leave even more on him sent a fresh spike of arousal through Kisame.

Itachi, meanwhile, had curled his delicate fingers around Kisame's cock and was stroking up and down, giving Kisame the best handjob he'd had in a good long while. The shark growled and slid his own hand down Itachi's stomach, fingers gently ghosting over abs (which Kisame fully intended to come back to and explore with his tongue at a later date) before curling around Itachi's cock and firmly stroking. Itachi panted and pulled Kisame back into another bruising kiss, his hand speeding up in response to Kisame's actions.

Neither of them lasted long after that, and a few minutes (and some intense kissing) later both men were coming in spurts all over Itachi's shirt. Afterwards, panting, sweating, and coming down from a couple of frankly amazing orgasms, Itachi was burrowing into Kisame's chest, arms loosely wrapped around the shark's shoulders, while Kisame pulled Itachi closer and nuzzled the top of his partner's head. Kisame had always been rather affectionate after sex, and it was nice to find that Itachi was the same way. He thought about grabbing Itachi's pants and boxers off the floor and handing them back, wanting to be a gentleman, but quickly discarded the idea when he realized how revolting the idea of Itachi wearing clothes right now seemed to him. Instead, he simply held his partner against his chest, hands gently sliding down Itachi's back. They stayed that way for several minutes in total silence; and then…

"Kisame?"

"Hm?"

Itachi titled his head up to look his partner in the eye. "There is absolutely no way that countertop would have been able to support my weight."

Kisame paused, processing Itachi's words. "What about our bathroom counter here?"

Judging from the way that Itachi began kissing him then, Kisame decided that at the very least, it was worth trying to find out.


End file.
